This handout features common types of music assignments and offers strategies and resources for writing them. Elvis costello once famously remarked that writing about music is like dancing about architecture. While he may have been overstating the case, it is often difficult to translate the non verbal sounds that you experience when you listen to music into words. To make matters more difficult, there are a variety of ways to describe music: 1 you can be technical and use terms from music theory. Example: the cadential pattern established in the opening 16 bars is changed by a phrasal infix of two bars mm.

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3 you can try to give a play by play description of what’s happening in the music. Example: the saxophone soloist played a lot of scales in his improvisation, and the pianist added sparse chords to it. Without an extensive knowledge of music theory, you will most likely wind up doing a combination of 2 and 3. so what if the dominant is prolonged? what is the effect and meaning of this? how your description of music becomes an analysis of music depends on the kind of assignment you are answering. In its most basic form, this is a statement about the piece with evidence that persuades your reader to agree with your argument.

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Clearly presenting your overall argument will help you organize your information around that main point. For example, if you are writing about the historical importance of beethoven’s ninth symphony, you might develop an argument like this: beethoven’s ninth symphony, completed and first performed in 1824, is historically significant because of the ways that it challenged and expanded audiences’ expectations of symphonic structure. If this is your argument, then you should research what the audience expectations for a symphony might have been in 1824 based on other pieces of the time. How many movements did symphonies typically have? what were their formal structures? what were the performing forces? once you understand the expectations of the day, you can identify the specific ways that beethoven’s ninth is different as well as what specific moments of the work the entrance of the choir, the grand recapitulation which begins the last movement, etc.

As you can see, making an argument in music involves historical or cultural evidence and specific observations about the piece itself which combine to give a richly textured picture of the music and the composer, as well as the context from which they both emerged. Even when making evaluative or interpretive claims about music, you should always provide evidence to support your claims. Music often evokes strong emotions in listeners, but these may not be the same for everyone. Music that you experience as powerful or triumphant may be experienced by another listener as angry or violent. Giving specific examples from the music will help explain your emotional reactions and give your reader a context for understanding them.

For example, instead of saying the chorus of smells like teen spirit sounds angrier than the verses. You might argue that the added distortion in the guitar, increase in volume, and additional strain on kurt cobain’s voice give the chorus of smells like teen spirit an angrier or more critical tone than the verses. On occasion, or in some assignments, you may feel overwhelmed by the amount of technical vocabulary used to describe even the simplest musical gestures.

Over the past thousand years, the study of music particularly western classical music has acquired a host of specialized terms from latin, italian, german, and french, many of which remain untranslated in common usage. Do not be intimidated! if you have questions about these terms, ask your instructor or consult a reliable music dictionary. Typically the terms that will be most helpful to you and most essential in your writing will be ones that have been covered in class and explained in the textbook. In addition to all the terms that you do want to use, musical discourse also comes with some terms that professors and tas might find particularly unhelpful.

Generally these include casual value judgments such as good, bad, lame, awesome, girly, soulful, etc. These words may be fine when discussing an album with your friends, but they are not acceptable descriptors in academic writing. The most glaring of these words, however, and the one that your instructors will undoubtedly be on the lookout for is authenticity and its close relatives authentic, real, genuine, etc. Instructors are particularly bothered by this word for two reasons: 1 authenticity is bound by a whole host of cultural and historical assumptions that make it impossible to pinpoint with any accuracy.

Music that is considered authentic by one person might be considered deeply inauthentic to another and vice versa. Similarly, music that was considered authentic by a group of fans in the 1960s may have lost its authenticity in the 1980s, but may have enjoyed a newfound authenticity in the early 20s. Describing a performer as authentic is shorthand for referring to one’s personal conception of how musicians should look, sound, and act. 1 concert report. you may have the opportunity to attend a live concert and report on it. This is different from a music review in which you pass judgment on how well the players performed.

Your professor might be okay with you adding your opinion, but most professors want you to listen closely to the music and try to describe it as accurately as possible using some of the vocabulary you’ve learned in class. A typical prompt usually asks for information about the performance venue, the performers, the music itself, and quite possibly your reactions to it. Make sure your report answers all of the questions! strategies. read through the concert program. sometimes there are program notes that provide background information and formal discussion of the music. If your concert is more like a jazz jam session, you may not know the names of any of the pieces you hear. sometimes you can just pick out your favorite performances to discuss. Elements to listen for might include but are not limited to instrumentation, variety of pieces performed, interaction of the performers, the setting size, type, and location of the venue, acoustics of the space, etc. 2 historical analysis: placing a piece in context. you may encounter this assignment in a music history or appreciation course. An instructor might ask you to pick a piece of music and discuss its historical context.

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This usually requires research, whether on the composer, the original performance, or the historical meaning. Sometimes you will be asked to relate the music itself to its historical setting. For example, you could write a paper relating how mozart’s 1778 visit to paris affected the compositions he wrote while there. strategies. make sure you feel comfortable with the basic historical information before beginning an analysis. If you don’t know exactly what mozart did and when, you will have trouble making any kind of argument.

If you are crafting an argument about how music relates to historical circumstances, then you should discuss those musical elements that most clearly support your argument. A possible thesis might be because mozart wanted a job in paris, he wrote a symphony designed to appeal to parisian tastes. If that is your argument, then you would focus on the musical elements that support this statement, rather than other elements that do not contribute to it. For example, though his viennese symphonies featured a repeated exposition, mozart did not include a repeat in the symphonies he composed in paris, which conformed more closely to parisian ideas about musical form at the time.